Piracy and the Privatisation of Maritime Security: Vessel Protection Policies Compared

By Eugenio Cusumano and Stefano Ruzza

In response to pirate attacks in the Western Indian Ocean, countries worldwide have increasingly authorized the deployment of armed guards from private military and security companies (PMSCs) on merchant ships. This widespread trend contradicts states’ commitment to retain a monopoly on violence and discourage the presence of arms on civilian vessels. This book conceptualizes the extensive use of PMSCs as a form of institutional isomorphism, combining the functionalist, ideational, political and organizational arguments used to account for the privatization of security on land into a synthetic explanation of the commercialization of vessel protection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030501563

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

E. Cusumano, S. RuzzaPiracy and the Privatisation of Maritime Securityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50156-3_1

1. Introduction: Protecting Merchant Vessels from Pirates

Eugenio Cusumano¹   and Stefano Ruzza²

(1)

History Department, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

(2)

Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

Eugenio Cusumano

Email: [e-mail]

On 25 March 2011, the Marshallese-flagged cargo vessel Avocet, owned by the New York-based firm Eagle Bulk Shipping, was approached by two skiffs carrying suspect Somali pirates after crossing the Gulf of Aden into the Indian Ocean. The pirates had reportedly been following the Avocet for two days, but their attempt to board the ship clashed against massive firepower. As soon as the skiffs approached the Avocet, armed personnel operating onboard the ship started shooting dozens of rounds against their occupants. The defenders of the Avocet believed that their shots killed or injured several pirates, but they could not exactly report how many because they were ‘not in the business of counting bodies’. This statement did not come from a military officer, but was made by Thomas Rothrauff, the CEO of the Trident Group, a private military and security company (PMSC) employing teams of former United States (US) Navy Seals to protect merchant vessels from pirates (Wiese Bockmann and Katz 2012).

While most private security teams showed greater restraint than Trident’s, the Avocet case was hardly unique. Between 2008 and March 2012, Somali pirates hijacked over 170 vessels in the maritime area embracing the Gulf of Aden, the Horn of Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. As the international military missions deployed in the region proved unable to immediately stop attacks, the shipping industry has increasingly resorted to onboard armed personnel. Although precise figures are missing, at least 50% of the merchant ships crossing the Gulf of Aden in 2012–2013 employed armed protection, using around 2700 guards (Brown 2012: 6). Not all these personnel were PMSC contractors. Some countries did not initially authorise the presence of private armed guards, providing merchant ships flying under their flag with vessel protection detachments (VPDs) consisting of military personnel. By 2020, however, all flag states with a sizeable registry had accepted the presence of private guards on ships.

This widespread convergence towards the resort to PMSCs as providers of vessel protection stands in stark contrast to the established practice of discouraging the presence of weapons onboard merchant vessels and states’ commitment to uphold a monopoly of violence. For centuries, the most powerful states in the international system sought to limit private violence on land and at sea alike, marginalising the use of actors like mercenaries and privateers as dangerous aberrations. Why have countries worldwide departed from such norms and increasingly authorised the resort to commercial security providers aboard vessels? This book seeks to answer this question.

1.1 Why This Book

Over 90% of the commodities traded worldwide travel by sea. Container ships and tankers are crucial suppliers of vital commodities including 2.9 billion tons of oil per year, roughly 62% of all the petroleum produced worldwide. Consequently, the shipping industry plays a crucial role in enabling today’s economic globalisation. The Gulf of Aden—close to the strategic Suez chokepoint and crossed by around 30,000 ships per year at the peak of the piracy emergency—plays an especially prominent role among international shipping routes (Reuters 2011). For this reason, the rise of Somali piracy threatened an incalculable economic damage to the world economy. In 2011 alone, ship owners and operators paid a grand total of USD 146 million in ransoms for hijacked ships and crews (Brown 2012: 4). Ransoms were only one among the many externalities of Somali piracy. Higher insurance premiums, the extra fuel and time spent on re-routing and the need to maintain higher speed caused additional costs that could endanger the economic viability of shipping, disrupting international trade at large. The risk that hijackers would cause natural disasters by deliberately or inadvertently damaging tankers, combined with the concern that the money obtained from ransoms could be used to fund terrorist organisations like Al Shabaab, further magnified the threat posed by Somali pirates (Singh and Bedi 2016).

Armed protection onboard vessels has played an important role in reducing the likelihood and success rate of pirate attacks. To date, no vessel protected by armed guards has been hijacked by Somali pirates. Suspect cases of disproportionate response and abuse in the use of force by PMSCs, however, have been hardly limited to the Avocet case. In fact, YouTube is replete with videos of armed contractors directing massive firepower against suspect pirates. The initial lack of any clear applicable regulatory frameworks and the very high likelihood that incidents would go under-reported led commentators to describe the situation off the Horn of Africa in 2011–2012 as a ‘Wild West’ (Wiese Bockmann and Katz 2012). Since then, monitoring and regulatory mechanisms have been significantly tightened thanks to multistakeholder initiatives like the establishment of an International Code of Conduct signed by a large number of PMSCs, the development of maritime security standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the 100 Series Rules for the Use of Force (Ralby 2018; Marin et al. 2017; Petrig 2013). Notwithstanding these initiatives, the deployment of armed guards onboard merchant vessels and the difficulties attached to monitoring their behaviour inevitably continue to raise issues of accountability and due diligence, questioning the appropriateness of commercialising tasks like vessel protection. To be sure, the presence of military personnel onboard merchant vessels has proven problematic as well. On 15 February 2012, two Italian Navy Marines were charged with accidentally killing two Indian fishermen and subsequently arrested by Indian authorities. Their detention caused a diplomatic controversy that still continues to date (Virzo 2017). As the use of both PMSCs and VPDs to protect merchant ships against pirates raises thorny legal and ethical issues, understanding the considerations underlying the choice of either public or private providers of vessel protection has important policy implications.

Flag states worldwide have been compelled to reconcile factors as diverse as ship owners and operators’ preferences, defence ministries’ manpower and budgetary strain, the political constraints attached to deploying military personnel abroad and the commitment to preserve a monopoly of violence. Examining how decision-makers juggle these different considerations and why they have eventually opted for commercialising vessel protection provides new theoretical insights into security studies and International Relations (IR) at large. Most notably, our book offers a novel contribution to two topical research areas: private and maritime security studies.

1.2 Vessel Protection and Security Studies: The State of the Art

The increasing use of PMSCs has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Already in the 1990s, scholars have noted the important role played by violent private actors in European state formation and colonial expansion (Thomson 1994; Black 1994; Tilly 1992). Scholars with an interest in African security also examined the role played by mercenaries in decolonisation wars as well as the development of the first military companies and their involvement in the civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone (Arnold 1999; Shearer 1998; Howe 1998). More recently, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan popularised the crucial role played by private contractors in enabling military operations by providing logistics, training, intelligence and armed security, paving the way to the first systematic studies on the subject (Kinsey 2006; Avant 2005; Singer 2003). Since then, scholars have extensively examined issues like the effectiveness of contractor support (Dunigan 2011; Cotton et al. 2010; Petersohn 2011), the ethics of privatising security (Pattison 2014a) and the regulation of the market for force (Francioni and Ronzitti 2012; Chesterman and Lehnardt 2007), as well as the structure (Kinsey 2005), identity (Fitzimmons 2013; Higate 2011), legitimising strategies (Cusumano 2020; Joachim and Schneiker 2014; Spearin 2008) and discursive power (Leander 2006) of PMSCs. IR scholars have been especially interested in studying the reasons underlying the increasing use of PMSCs and its variations across countries and over time. Existing studies have stressed the importance of material factors like financial, technological and operational considerations (Kinsey and Patterson 2012), ideological preferences (Leander 2013; Krahmann 2010; Stanger 2009), international norms change (Casiraghi 2020; Panke and Petersohn 2012; Krahmann 2013; Percy 2007), political convenience (Cusumano 2016; Avant and Sigelmann 2010), as well as the varying interests and organisational cultures of military and foreign policy bureaucracies (Cusumano 2015; Cusumano and Kinsey 2015).

In comparison, the increasing resort to PMSCs as providers of vessel protection has been explored much less extensively. To be sure, scholars have examined the role of commercial providers of security at sea both in historical perspective (Colas and Mabee 2010; Thomson 1994) and today (Cullen and Berube 2012). In the wake of the increase in the use of PMSCs, scholars have mapped the use of PMSCs at sea (Gould 2017; Brown 2012), analysed its strategic implications (Fitzimmons 2015; Spearin 2010) and outlined the different regulatory frameworks applicable to vessel protection (Feldtmann 2018; Marin et al. 2017; Bürgin and Schneider 2015). The logics underlying security privatisation at sea, however, have not been systematically studied. In a previous article, we provided a first comparative analysis of why some countries commercialised vessel protection while others did not (Cusumano and Ruzza 2018). In this book, we build on this exploratory study, advancing the study of private security at sea on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Empirically, this book-length analysis embraces a larger population of cases—covering all European countries with sizeable shipping industries as well as the largest open registries—and a wider timeframe—examining the transformation of vessel protection policies from 2008, when Somali pirate peaked, until March 2020. Theoretically, we provide the first conceptualisation of commercialisation of vessel protection as a form of institutional isomorphism, developing a synthetic, multicausal explanation for the increasing resort to PMSCs at sea. By doing so, our work does not only advance the study of private security, but also resonates with IR scholars’ growing interest in maritime security and the governance of the seas.

Navies and the maritime domain have always occupied a prominent role in the study of geopolitics and military power. Accordingly, scholars have dedicated close attention to the notion of sea power (Stavridis 2017; Till 2009; Luttwak 1974), maritime military doctrines and security strategies (Riddervold 2015; Germond 2015; Patalano 2012), and the relative capabilities and organisational cultures of navies worldwide (McCabe et al. 2019; Stöhs 2018). The broader array of security issues and actors associated with the maritime domain, however, has long remained unexplored, causing IR scholarship to suffer from ‘seablindess’ (Bueger and Edmunds 2017). In recent years, various scholars have taken up the challenge of addressing this overlook by conceptualising maritime security (Bueger 2015), mapping ‘zonation’ at sea (Ryan 2019) and examining the status of merchant vessels, their importance to state power and the extent to which they are subjected to state sovereignty (De Nevers 2015). This growing interest in maritime security was mainly shaped by two topical phenomena: seaborne migration and piracy. Scholars of maritime migration have increasingly examined the governance of maritime borders search and rescue (SAR) operations (Cusumano 2019; Aalberts and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2014), the tension between combatting illegal immigration and saving lives at sea (Moreno-Lax 2017; Aalberts and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2014), as well as the role played by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in SAR (Cusumano 2019; Cuttitta 2018; Stierl 2018).

Scholars of piracy have extensively examined piracy in historical and comparative perspectives (McCabe 2017), examining the business models adopted by pirates (Daxecker and Prins 2013), the relationship between piracy and state power (Daxecker and Prins 2017), as well as the institutional regimes (Struet et al. 2013), assemblages (Bueger 2018), communities of practice (Bueger 2013), ethics (Pattison 2014b) and legal frameworks (Geiss and Petrig 2011) developed to combat piracy worldwide. Given its prominence between 2008 and 2012 and its severe economic costs, Somali piracy has attracted especially considerable attention. Scholars have examined the informal networks (Hastings and Philips 2015) and political economy underpinning Somali piracy (Percy and Shortland 2013), pinned down its costs for the shipping industry (Murphy 2011) and examined African (Bueger 2013) as well as international responses thereto (Percy 2016). Most studies identified lawlessness, state fragility, environmental degradation and chronic underdevelopment in Somaliland and Puntland as the main factors enabling the rise of Somali piracy, stressing the need to address the root causes of the phenomenon on land (Percy and Shortland 2013; Hansen 2013; Chalk 2010).

While diverse in subject and scope, these two strands of literature do not only illustrate the timeliness and policy-relevance of maritime security studies, but also shed light into debates that lie at the core of IR, including the evolving relationship between public and private actors and the transformation of state sovereignty. As the first comprehensive examination of how states have resorted to PMSCs to combat maritime crime, this book is ideally suited to explore these key issues. We therefore hope that our study of vessel protection may serve as a source of novel insights for academics and practitioners alike, simultaneously contributing to both maritime and private security studies.

1.3 Research Design and Methodology

In order to investigate the increasing commercialisation of vessel protection worldwide, the bulk of this book provides an in-depth, controlled comparison of the British, Dutch and Italian cases. The United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands and Italy possess comparable merchant fleets, which has resulted in a similar exposure to pirate attacks between 2008 and 2012. At the beginning, these countries adopted three very distinct approaches to vessel protection, ranging from the exclusive use of PMSCs to the employment of military VPDs only. A preliminary assessment of their current policies ostensibly shows persisting differences: while the UK immediately decided to resort to PMSCs only, Italian and Dutch legislation still outlines a dual approach, authorising the use of private guards as a subsidiary form of security for merchant ships, only permitted when state VPDs are not available. As the ensuing analysis shows, however, Italy and the Netherlands too have adopted approaches that de facto turn PMSCs into the main provider of vessel protection. British, Dutch and Italian governments’ convergence towards the use of PMSCs is therefore a crucial window into the factors enabling and inhibiting isomorphism in vessel protection policies and the privatisation of security at sea.

We examine the policy processes underlying the evolution of vessel protection policies in these countries by means of process tracing. Increasingly identified as the main tool for diachronic, within-case observation, process tracing allows for investigating whether the succession and timing of a chain of events coincide with prior, theoretically derived causal mechanisms (Bennett and Checkel 2014; Beach and Pedersen 2013; Bennett and Elman 2007). The evolution of vessel protection policies in these countries offers the opportunity for a systematic congruence testing of existing functionalist, ideational, political and organisational explanations of security privatisation and their applicability to vessel protection (George and Bennett 2005). Vessel protection decisions can be best understood as a sequential policy process rather than the outcome of a single decision taken in isolation. We therefore rely on the technique of sequencing (Jupille et al. 2003) to combine these arguments into a thick, multicausal explanation of vessel protection, assessing the relative importance of each of the factors identified by the existing literature as drivers of security privatisation at each stage of the decision-making process.

In order to combine the in-depth investigation of three crucial cases with a global analysis of vessel protection and its commercialisation, we complement the study of the British, Dutch and Italian cases with a wider examination of other European countries and the largest open registries. European countries serve as flag states for large shipping and fishing industries and have thus found themselves severely exposed to pirate attacks. The size of their shipping industry, their relative exposure to pirate attacks and the intrinsic importance of their vessel protection policies are the key criteria adopted for the selection of the other European cases examined, namely Malta, Greece, Cyprus, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium and Spain. We then turn to the three extra-European cases with the largest open ship registries: Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands. As they are especially convenient for ship owners and operators, the registries of these three countries collectively account for over 40% of the total tonnage of merchant vessels worldwide. Consequently, the policies developed by Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands have been crucial in shaping global vessel protection policies.

Evidence on all the above-mentioned cases is based on document analysis and a set of semi-structured interviews with public officials, military officers and shipping and private security industry representatives conducted between May 2014 and March 2020.

1.4 Structure of the Book

The book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 outlines the key concepts, sketches the key dynamics underlying the functioning of the international shipping industry and briefly examines the impact of Somali piracy on maritime trade. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical framework of the volume, introducing the concept of institutional isomorphism and its coercive, normative and mimetic components as well as the functionalist, ideational, political and organisational explanations for the increasing use of PMSCs identified by private security scholarship. Chapters 4–6 present three in-depth case studies—the UK, the Netherlands and Italy—while Chapter 7 frames them within the broader array of vessel protection policies developed by other European countries by providing a more cursory examination of how PMSCs have been employed in a counter-piracy capacity by Malta, Greece, Cyprus, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium and Spain. Chapter 8 zooms out of Europe by examining the cases of Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, the three countries hosting the largest open registries. Chapter 9 assesses the theoretical framework against the evidence provided by the case studies, illustrating why the concept of institutional isomorphism can provide a parsimonious account of the widespread tendency to commercialise private protection, but only a thick, multicausal explanation of the factors underlying the use of PMSCs can account for the different timing and persisting small differences in states’ decisions to allow for the presence of armed guards onboard merchant vessels.

Besides summarising the findings of the volume and outlining some avenues for future research, the conclusions serve two main related purposes. First, we analyse the effectiveness of existing vessel protection regimes. Second, we examine whether the widespread resort to and perceived effectiveness of private guards in protecting vessels against pirates can serve as a precedent for security privatisation of land, thereby strengthening the momentum for outsourcing a broader array of security and defence tasks.

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© The Author(s) 2020

E. Cusumano, S. RuzzaPiracy and the Privatisation of Maritime Securityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50156-3_2

2. Piracy and Counter-Piracy in the Twenty-First Century

Eugenio Cusumano¹   and Stefano Ruzza²

(1)

History Department, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

(2)

Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

Eugenio Cusumano

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Piracy is defined as ‘an act of boarding or attempting to board any ship with the apparent intent to commit theft or any other crime and with the apparent intent or capability to use force in the furtherance of that act’ (IMB 2009: 3). It is one of the oldest forms of maritime crime, and it is still present today in different regions of the world. Piracy attacks have been on the rise in the late twentieth century, becoming a major security issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Somali pirates proved able to hijack a large number of vessels and obtain major revenues through ransoms. The situation was soon considered untenable by the shipping industry and the international community at large. As a result, there has been a proliferation of multistakeholder initiatives to counter Somali piracy. Measures like multilateral military missions alone proved insufficient to stop Somali piracy, and pirate attacks against ships were contained only when the use of armed teams onboard vessels became widespread.

The purpose of this chapter is to present Somali piracy, its impact, and the responses it has generated, paving the way for the examination of vessel protection policies conducted in the remainder of the book. To this end, the chapter starts with a historical overview of piracy and order at sea. Section 2.2 moves to contemporary piracy, examining different regions of the world, namely Southeast Asia, the Gulf of Guinea and the Gulf of Aden. Section 2.3 is dedicated to a more in-depth analysis of Somali piracy, as the vessel protection policies assessed in this book were specifically aimed at countering this specific instance of